"I like to be on the cutting edge, but not the bleeding edge."
-- Jesse Horn
Cover cropper and no-tiller Jesse Horn decided to try something different this year for harvest.
Instead of multiple passes, first with a harvester, and then with an air seeder for cover crops, the Philpot, Ky., producer decided to hook the seeder straight on to his harvester. He's betting this will lead to fewer passes and less compaction as he brings in this year's harvest.
On this episode of Cover Crop Strategies, brought to you by Source by Sound Agriculture, Horn talks about his new approach, and about how expanded from a seed dealer into a full-service equipment dealer under the brand Big H Ag Supply, and more.
The Cover Crop Strategies podcast series is brought to you by SOURCE®️ by Sound Agriculture.
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Full Transcript
Brian O'Connor:
Welcome to the Cover Crop Strategies podcast. I'm your host Brian O'Connor. I'll be taking over from Noah Newman, who's still with us, still doing a great job. Just moved on to other podcasts. Today's episode is brought to you by SOURCE from Sound Agriculture. I'll be talking with Jesse Horn near Owensboro, Kentucky. Jesse's a no-tiller and cover crop enthusiast who decided to do something a little different with his harvesting equipment this year. So let's get into it.
Jesse Horn:
My name is Jesse Horn. I'm from Philpot, Kentucky, right outside Owensboro. And I farm alongside my dad and my grandfather. 39 years old and went to college, left the farm for a while and been back about 15 years now, I think. We've taken our farm to almost 100% no-till. Big users of waterways and have been using cover crops as we were able. We deal with a lot of rainfall in Kentucky here and sometimes that makes managing cover crops challenging, but big fans of no-till for some of the obvious reasons of less labor, less fuel, less hours on the machine. But ultimately we are conservation minded farmers and we're looking to improve the health and value of our soil and no-till is very, very important step in doing that. So I appreciate you reaching out. I'm a fan of the magazine and have always wanted to attend no-till conference, never have been able to, but really admire the promotion of this practice and a widespread adopter. So appreciate you reaching out and look forward to this conversation.
Brian O'Connor:
What's your rotation like? What do you grow?
Jesse Horn:
Well, 100% corn, soybean rotation. We're a little bit too wet to grow wheat for harvest. We seem to just be able to grow about 75 or 80 bushel wheat and it's hard to make the economics work on that when we can grow 70 and 80 bushel soybeans. So we're a hundred percent corn, soybean rotation, rotate every single year.
Brian O'Connor:
Okay. So you mentioned cover crops. What do you typically use for cover crops?
Jesse Horn:
So up until the last couple of years, I would say about four years ago we started experimenting a little bit, but primarily have been heavy users of wheat, just bin-run cover crop wheat. We'd go in and sow ditch banks and areas where a lot of water would run through the field. We have a lot of six to 12% slope ground and just trying to stop erosion. And in the last three to four years we've experimented with some oats, with some canola, Austrian winter peas. But one of the biggest challenges we've had, and I think most farmers face is, when it's harvest time, the priority is getting the crop harvested. We got to keep the combines rolling.
That means that our cover crop is not getting sold until there's a break. So whether we have a rain event or maybe the combine's broke down for a period of time or we finish harvest. And that's been very limiting on the species that we can use. And even in Kentucky where I'm at, we've had some falls' that by the time we got done with harvest it was cool enough, is it worth disturbing the ground to plant cover crop when it may not come up until February? And so that's been a big challenge of ours and one we've been trying to solve for several years up until this point.
Brian O'Connor:
Now you're trying something different this year as I understand it from your past practices. What are you trying that's new this year related to cover crops?
Jesse Horn:
So we've got a smaller farmer in my area that's stuck an air seeder on his combine and I visited with him for two years and I got a lot of great advice from these guys. Mark and Matthew Turner in Ohio County just south of me, were really the first to adopt this in the area. But like I said, they put an air seeder on their combine. And I visited with some guys at Farm Machinery Show, there are lots of different products out there, but I picked up a dealership for APV America, that's an Austrian company that builds a really high quality air-seeder that is monitor controlled. Calibration is very easy. And both of those things are really important to me because as we get into some of these different species, seed costs are quite a bit more expensive than bin-run cover crop wheat. So I did a lot of research, selected APV America, picked up a dealership for them.
My company, Big H Ag Supply, sells those now. And we really wanted to pilot this program. My dad and I farm about 3000 acres and I've got a customer who also farms about the same. I run Case IH equipment, he runs John Deere equipment. So we've got these seeders on the two most popular brands of combine and we stuck two 300 liter seeders, which translates into about eight and a half to nine bushels. So we got two eight and a half to nine bushel seeders on the combine. And we're blowing this seed on as we harvest. We've got hoses and deflector plates mounted on the heads every 30 inches and we're getting a really good pattern. I've already got some of this cover crop emerged and off to a really good start here. So this allows us to run some different species.
As I mentioned, I'm running two pounds of canola with two pounds of turnip and two pounds of radish. I can cover a lot of acres there, six pounds to the acre. I'm getting like 150 or 60 acres out of a fill up on each machine. Now we just made the switch over to cereal rye. Cool weather is upon us and we're dry, we're really dry. And I know if my rye needs to lay there while it'll still take off and grow whenever we get a little moisture. So we made that switch last week and we're only covering about 27, 28 acres out of a fill up now. But that's still pretty manageable. We're hitting it with our seed tender, five minutes, I timed it the other day, five minutes from the time I pulled the combine up to the seed tender, get out of the combine, fill them up and back in and running right there at five minutes. So I think as I mentioned, the biggest challenge with cover crops in the fall is keeping the combines rolling and so far we've been very successful with that.
Brian O'Connor:
You mentioned this was kind of a process of osmosis you learned from other guys. Have you done any other research or seen any of the other results? And you had mentioned in our brief discussion before that you're learning things from this process. What have you learned?
Jesse Horn:
Well, I like to be on the cutting edge but not the bleeding edge. So it's always interesting to let somebody else jump into unknown waters first. But got some great advice from these guys that I mentioned earlier, Mark and Matthew Turner here in my area. But I also sell seed for Beck's Hybrids. And Beck's has done some great research on cover crops. Of course read the No-Till Magazine. And cover crops are not new, right? There are guys who have been doing this for a long time and have been able, through the use of legumes, to completely move away from commercial fertilizer. There's a lot of really neat things with cover crop. We just got to figure out how to scale it because it's not just getting it sold. We got to manage it in the spring too. If we're going to continue farming, we got to plant next year's crop. And 3000 acres of cover crop, we're going to find out how easy that is to manage.
I think my canola and my turnips and radishes, that's not going to be an issue. But looks like I'm going to have roughly 2000 acres of cereal rye and we're just sowing that at 35 pounds to the acre. I'm hoping for a 50 to 60% emergence, but I don't think we're going to be too thick any way we go. I'm really hoping to plant into a lot of this green. I did a little bit of this last year. We just scattered it with some fertilizer behind the combine and pulled a little Phillips Rotary Harrow, kind of turned it under the residue. I planted into that green this spring. There were virtually no other weeds present, just my cereal ryes.
So I let my corn emerge to about V2 and we went in with a shot of Roundup and a full rate of Acuron, had a great, great stand of corn, one of the best stands I had anywhere in a very, very clean field. As that rye broke down, basically formed a carpet on the ground that helped keep my weeds at bay until my corn could canopy. And so I'm going to do more of that. I think that's really exciting. I've got air operated row cleaners that I can put some pressure on and slice through this rye. And I think that is going to be how I plan a whole lot of my corn for the 2023 crop.
Brian O'Connor:
So it's a corn year coming up. Are you rotating back to soybeans the year after and do you plan to keep this up for soybeans as well?
Jesse Horn:
I do, yeah. So we're cover cropping every acre and I'm roughly half and half about 1500 acres of corn and 1500 acres of beans. And we have not been specific with the species in front of each crop. I think that's probably the next level in the management of this thing. For this year, whatever is in the seeder, if we're running beans that day, that's what is getting put down. If we're running corn that day, it's what is getting put down. And as we learn and grow in this thing, we may tailor our mix to next year's crop, but it's a process. We're now dragging a pickup and seed tender to the field during harvest that we weren't pulling around before. And I think it's important for anybody adopting a new practice to figure out how to make it work and then fine tune it later. And the next level of fine tuning for me is figuring out what species we want to put in front of which crop.
Brian O'Connor:
Now you mentioned you deal for Beck's and you had said previously that you started out in seeds, but you saw a whole bunch of other stuff now too. Can you explain a little bit about that process?
Jesse Horn:
Yeah, so we started out selling seed and Beck's has this really kind of famous, even the guys that don't like Beck's like our PFR program. And I continue to have customers coming to me. My customers are my friends, and when you become a friend and a trusted advisor of a guy, you talk about a lot more than just the seed you're selling. And so we continue to have customers coming to us looking for equipment advice. And so we started selling things that were PFR-proven, Closing Wheels and that kind of thing. And this has turned into a whole different side of our business. We're now a Precision Planting dealer, just going into our second year, and that's going extremely well. Continue to sell Closing Wheels, but all kinds of planter upgrades. We look for things that are either better than OEM or a totally new innovative idea or the same as OEM, but at a better price.
We're selling a lot of GBGI products, which are better blades, better parallel arms, better gauge wheel arms for planters. We do a lot of stuff through Martin-Till, mainly row cleaners, but they've got some great closing wheels too. Copperhead acquired RK Products, they've got a fantastic closing wheel tail repair kit. And what we try to instill in our customers is we cannot get to a strong finish, we can't grow a great crop if we don't have a great start. And the only way to have a great start is have a good planter. And that doesn't mean it has to be a pneu's planter, it's just got to be a well maintained, well-equipped planter. And so one of the most affordable ways we can do that, this is kind of our little catchphrase, we make your planter better. We can take any planter you have, rebuild it, retool it, even if that means stripping it down to the toolbar and hanging new units on it.
Pretty much any way you spin it, we can take the planter you have and make it as good as a brand new one usually for about half the money. So we're doing electric drives, hydraulic down force, FurrowForce from Precision Planting, very innovative two stage closing system and got data to support all of this. We're a very agronomy driven sales company and I believe in being a solutions provider and not just a salesman. I want your business for the next 50 years, even if that means I don't make a sale today. And sometimes we have to tell customers, "In my opinion, that's not the right move for you to make". So I try to put everything into my business the way I experience it as a farmer. And I think that's what has contributed to our success. We have people's trust, they know we have their best interests at heart and we'll tell them if their idea is in our opinion the right thing to do or not.
Brian O'Connor:
We'll go back to my discussion with Jesse Horn from Owensboro, Kentucky in a minute. First, I'd like to thank our sponsor, SOURCE from Sound Agriculture unlocks more of the nitrogen and phosphorous already in your fields. This foliar application has a low use rate and you can mix it right into your tank, giving it a free ride onto the field. Check out SOURCE, it's like caffeine for microbes. Learn more at www.sound.ag. Now back to my discussion with Jesse Horn.
Some implements are kind of no-till specific. Do you focus on no-till in the business? Do you guys work with everybody? How does that work?
Jesse Horn:
We work with everybody, but as I said, we're a real agronomy driven company and we've seen the benefits of no-till or reduced tillage. We've had several customers be able to eliminate a tillage pass by putting air operated row cleaners on. Martin's ACCR is a favorite of mine. Precision Planting's Reveal is another good one. We can be aggressive with a row cleaner and basically almost strip till in front of the planter that way and keep a turbo till or an ultra till or something like that, out of the field. And if we're not doing full width tillage, that's a win in my book.
Everybody just wants to get their crop established. That's the only reason most guys pull a tillage tool. They're looking for strong emergence and they feel like the only way they can get that is to pull a tillage tool across the field, better heat penetration, all that stuff. And if we can help them achieve that without pulling a tillage tool, there're the savings of fuel, labor, hours on the tractor, maintenance on the tillage tool. Not to mention, some of these tillage tools are in excess of $100,000, and that's all equity that they can put back into their planter, making their planter better.
Brian O'Connor:
We always hear no-tillers love to talk about their planter rigs. And certainly the planter is the number one, certainly the one of the more important aspects of no-till generally, if not the most important aspect of no-till generally. So this new setup that you're trying with the planter, with the air seater behind the harvester, what do you imagine the impacts on compaction? It sounds to me like from what you described, it's going to be kind of a loss because you have the tender and the pickup truck out there that you wouldn't have before. But do you expect less compaction as a result of this?
Jesse Horn:
Well, I think so. I mean we've already got the combine and the grain cart running across the field, as I mentioned, it's pretty dry right now. So I would venture to say we're not creating any compaction right now, but even in a wet year we're blowing this seed in right behind the head. So the shaft coming out of the combine is mulching over top of it. As soon as there is enough moisture to germinate that seed, it takes off. Those roots begin to penetrate, helping to alleviate compaction from previous passes. It's just a win all around on that front. We're already making a pass, so on the compaction front we're already making that pass across the field and any time we can eliminate a pass, we're helping to eliminate compassion.
Brian O'Connor:
It sounds also like you're taking steps within the crops themselves, like radish and that kind of thing to kind of fight that in the event that it might occur. Is that right?
Jesse Horn:
Yeah, that's what we're hoping for. In my small seed mix, the canola's got great deep roots, radish is helping break up compaction and turnip at the top level of the soil as well as scavenging for nutrients. That's a big thing and including those two in the mix is... We had a drought here in Kentucky, went about five weeks without any rain and a lot of my corn is sub 200 bushel and we're used to a significantly better crop than that. So I've got a lot of nutrients still laying out there and I'm hopeful that my turnips and radishes can gather a lot of that up and put it back into the next crop for me.
Brian O'Connor:
All right. So I have a standard question that I ask. It's the Ira Flatow question from Science Friday. He normally asks researchers to this effect, If I gave you a blank check, what would you research? So I like to ask farmers the same question. If I gave you a blank check for the next season, what would you try? What are you interested in? What comes next?
Jesse Horn:
For me, the most important thing in farming is to get a good start. I forget his name, but there's an agronomy professor from Purdue University that likes to say, everybody has 300 bushel corn till you open the bag. And I'm really interested in pursuing innovations in planting. There's a new product coming that orients the seed. We know that if we can place all the seeds tip down, we get about a 25 GDU improvement in emergence, quicker emergence. And so that's where I would spend my money, is investing in and researching and possibly helping develop tools to get our crop planted earlier, get it emerged faster. We continue to have changes in our weather pattern, whether it's too hot and dry a summer or too cool and wet a summer. But we generally have pretty decent springs. So the earlier, the faster, the better we can get our crop planted I think is going to continue to yield success for farmers.
And we've seen this in soybeans. We've had a huge shift in our area. We've got guys planting soybeans last week of March, first week of April, continuing to push that envelope and try to move earlier because we see the yield enhancement from that. In the last five years, many of my customers have bought additional planters just to be able to run out early and plant soybeans where traditionally we would plant all our corn first and maybe we weren't getting started planting soybeans till the middle or end of May. Now we hope to have all our beans planted by the middle of April and then start planting corn. And that's been a major operations change here that's been yield driven. And I think we're going to continue to see people trying to plant earlier and earlier. And so anything we can do to improve emergence is going to help with that. And to me that's some of the best money spent right now is on planting equipment and planting technology to get our seeds up in a more uniform quick timeline and get us off to the races.
Brian O'Connor:
You mentioned weeds. Are there any particular weed species that you're concerned about and what are they?
Jesse Horn:
Well, we have quite a bit of a waterhemp in our area and I know that's something most states are now dealing with, but it's our number one issue here. And cover crops in general, no matter the species, tend to help with water hemp, the better the residue mat, as long as we have a good stand, our best herbicide is canopy. There's no way around that. If we keep sunlight from hitting the ground, that's the best herbicide we can have. So between the crop canopy of an earlier planted better established crop and the residue of a cover crop on the ground, we stand a chance at fighting these things.
Brian O'Connor:
So what were the challenges that you faced, and I'm going to switch back to your business for a second, what were the challenges you face making that transition from kind of seed dealership more to the equipment side? Is this additional personnel you have to hire? How do you identify challenges and how do you address it?
Jesse Horn:
Well, what drove us to get into this business is our customers were asking us to be in this business. And so we already had the demands, so we had to figure out what brands we wanted to take on. And I really try to use the products I sell on my own farm, just like these APV seeders. We didn't just go out and try to sell a whole bunch of these right off the bat. I put them on my combine, I put them on a customer's combine. We're seeing how it goes and we're learning some things along the way here, but figuring out what products are right is a trial by fire kind of thing.
And we've had some products that we took on that I used on my own farm and I thought, man, this is not what I thought it was going to be and this is not a product I want to promote. And I think that's really important and I think our customers see a lot of value in that. We're not just out to make a dollar, we're trying to provide profitable solutions to our customers. And that means that in almost every case, we've tried it on our own farm first and figured out if it's going to work or it's not going to work or if it's going to work, but needs these modifications. And we know ahead of time what challenges we're going to face.
Brian O'Connor:
What kind of spacing do you work with on your corn and soybeans? Have you tried anything narrow?
Jesse Horn:
Pretty much all 30 inch corn in this area and 15 inch soybeans. But we're starting to see some guys, as we move these planters earlier in the calendar year, go to 30 inch beans. They'll take their corn planter and run a third planter in the bean field. And that's been working pretty well as long as we get them planted early. There's been a little bit of narrow corn work in this area, but the equipment cost, the corn was never worse. It just wasn't that much better. And the equipment cost drove a lot of guys back out of that, but I think we're starting to see some shift back into that. There's also some inter-cropping taking place in Kentucky and that's very exciting. I'm in the Total Acre group and we've got a member in my camp that has been very successful with cropping, Cash Farms out of Mayfield, Kentucky. And so that's really interesting and I think we're going to continue to see the interest in that grow.
But I think there is something to narrow corn, we just got to figure out how to manage it. And that's one of the biggest challenges we have in Kentucky is we generally have pretty small fields, my average field size is a little less than 20 acres. And with narrow corn, it's hard. You'd like to be able to run your sprayer across the rows and run over less crop that way. And we don't have the space to be able to do that. So I think that's one of the biggest challenges we have with narrow corn, is trying to figure out how to make it work in our space here.
Brian O'Connor:
All right. Well that's all the questions I can think of. Is there anything else you want to add that we didn't touch on or any observations to make before we close it out in here?
Jesse Horn:
Well, I just want to say I really appreciate the work that you guys are doing to promote no-till and conservancy. And I think one of the biggest challenges we have as farmers in the US is battling the public opinion of us. It's shifted greatly over time and I want people to know, and I try to do my part in sharing this story, that we want to be stewards of the land, we want to be conservationists, but at the end of the day, we also have to be able to afford to farm. And somewhere in between, is where most of us land. And I really appreciate the work you are doing to promote the farming lifestyle and conservation measures and no-till, and that's where the success of the American farmer lies.
Brian O'Connor:
All right, well thanks for talking with me. I always love to talk to guys that are trying new stuff or on the edge of things that are kind of pushing stuff. So thanks very much for your time and have good day.
Jesse Horn:
Thank you so much. Appreciate the call.
Brian O'Connor:
That was me and Jesse Horn of Owensboro, talking about his decision to use an air seeder on the back of his harvester this year, and also kind of his transition from seed vendor into equipment vendor. Thanks again to Sound for keeping the lights on. You can hear more podcasts like this @covercropstrategies.com. Under the resources tab, we have access to all our past podcasts. You can also email me at boconnor@lessitermedia.com. It's Lessiter, L E S S I T E R. You can also call me, my phone number's (262) 777-2413. That's it for today. Thanks very much. And Farm Ugly.
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